Slightly Techie

Would you like some Microsoft with your Java?

Richard Rousseau — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:32:57 GMT

While installing a Java update I came across the typical bundled software option and found Sun was promoting the MSN Toolbar. I recall previous Java updates offering the Google Toolbar and was a bit surprised to find a Microsoft product being bundled with a Java update. Aren't Sun and Microsoft competitors? At least their frameworks are (.Net vs. Java).

The install option was selected by default. I took the screenshot after I unchecked it.

Google Reader or Bloglines...

Richard Rousseau — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 07:59:03 GMT

An email from fellow blogger and brother-in-law Eric prompted me to checkout Google Reader for reading and managing all the blogs I subscribe to. After importing all 154 of my feeds, I sat back with a cup of coffee and started reading. I dug it...quite a bit. Google Reader has the usual google UI goodness. The seamless updating of different browser elements that's so shiny and Web 2.0-y.

I haven't played with the tagging yet, and I'm not sure what "Shared Items" are, but Google Reader has one killer piece of functionality that has already converted me...It only marks items you've actually read as "read". Bloglines is terrible about this. As soon as you click on a folder in bloglines, it assumes you've read all the posts within. It's a real pain to have to update items as "Keep New" individually in Bloglines. It's a backwards way of processing things. Google Reader updates each item as read once you've scrolled past it.

Because of this feature alone, I'm switching to Google Reader.

My Outlook GTD System...

Richard Rousseau — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:57:19 GMT

Since I'm a big fan of the Getting Things Done system, I'm always looking for ways to increase the efficiency of my process. I want to dedicate a few posts to how I've setup my GTD system and the shortcuts I use to make it easier. Let's start this off with a "brief" post about how I organize GTD within Outlook.

As I noted in an earlier post, I use Bonsai as my main GTD project/action storage. But as many of us business users know, there is an entirely separate system that needs the full attention of a good GTD implementation...Email.

I honestly feel that if everyone used GTD just for their email, we might just achieve world peace How many of you out there have an Inbox with thousands of messages just sitting there? Can you list all the people you're waiting on for responses? Do you know which emails you've acted on and which you still have to do? What about everything you worked on last week, or the instructions your vendor sent you about Project X?

I used to be in Email hell. My inbox was the only folder I used. There were thousands of messages in it. Once every year I'd make an "Archive" folder and move everything from an arbitrary point in the past into that folder. I tried using "Flags" and "Reminders", but those never stuck.

I have now reached Email nirvana (not that one, this one). My Inbox is empty. I process everything. I delete ferverently. Every meaningful email has a place.

Let me give a brief overview of the Outlook portion of my GTD implementation. I'm not going to go into great detail about GTD, I'm just going to show you how I process my emails...

My Outlook GTD

For starters, I use the Shortcuts view in the left pane of my Outlook. This keeps the clutter of all my actual folders way way down.

Now, any seasoned GTDer looking at my list of folders should see that I've got the main tenants of the system all lined up. For the uninitiated, here is the rundown...

Main Section
    Inbox - Everything comes in here and remains until processed.
    @Action - Anything that will take more than 2 minutes to actually do goes into this folder.
    @Waiting For - Anything that I'm waiting for a response on goes into this folder.

Project Support Section - Any currently active projects get a shortcut here. All project related emails get moved into their appropriate folder. (Note: The names of my projects have been changed to protect the innocent).

Reference Email Section
    @Somday/Maybe - Anything that might hold interest or be a good project "sometime" in the future.
    @Read/Review - All email lists I subscribe to go in here. I never really look at them after that :)
    @Completed - The final email from a non-project task goes in here. Hopefully the full conversation is intact. Useful to see what you've been up to.

My normal routine is to go through each item in my Inbox and process it appropriately. In GTD terms this means doing the task if it's less that 2 minutes, deferring the task till later, delegating the task, deleting if not needed or filing if needed.

Another part of my implementation is that I CC all emails I send to myself. This gives me an easy to reach copy of all my correspondence. Some of these get deleted immediately, others get moved into my @Waiting For folder so I know what I'm waiting on from someone. You can setup Outlook to automatically CC you on everything, so there's no overhead in typing your name on every email.

Doing
If it's quick, and you have the time. Do it. Nuff said. Move your CC'd response into the @Completed folder.

Deferring
Can't do it right now? Move it into your @Action folder. Review this folder regularly when you have time to burn off on these items.

Delegating
Not your problem? Need more information? Got a someone you can pawn it off on? Forward it to them and move your CC'd forward into the @Waiting For folder. The best part about this folder is that the next day, you can iterate through each of them re-forwarding each message asking "What's up with this issue?". People will think you're totally ontop of things (and you will be!).

Filing
Important information in this message? Stuff you'd like to keep around for future reference? If it's part of an active project, move it into your Project folder. If it's long term stuff (HR docs, important memos, ~~sweet pics of Paris Hilton~~) move it into the appropriate Reference folder.

Deleting
Don't need it ever again? Delete. If everyone did this one step right away, it would probably save exobytes of space and put hard drive manufacturers out of business.

So there's the "brief" overview of my Outlook GTD system. Like I said, there is really nothing special here. It's just important to keep up on your processing! You'll end up making all this second nature and being a very happy camper.

Office 2007 OneNote...

Richard Rousseau — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 19:21:21 GMT

So I'm a pretty big fan of organization programs. I currently use Natara Bonsai, which is a pretty sophisticated outlining program. It syncs up nicely with my Treo 650 and the mobile client has the full functionality of the windows client. I use it for organizing projects at work and at home. It fits well with the Getting Things Done system that I've been using for the past year (Thanks again Kenny!). More on Bonsai and GTD later.

Before I used Bonsai I was a huge Microsoft OneNote fan (this was back in the Office 2003 days). It was the first org app that really caught my attention and I quickly fell in love with it's ease of use. I like it's freeform nature. You could click on an area within and start typing. It allowed for organized lists, tables, imported images. It integrated nicely with the other Office apps. You could create emails/tasks/appointmens from any of your OneNote outlines. The tasks would remain synced with Outlook. You could also import any Outlook Notes directly into OneNote. I used this particular feature to take notes on my old Samsung i700, then import them into OneNote for further processing.

While this system worked, if you wanted to be completely mobile it had one serious shortcoming. There wasn't a mobile client. It was a one way street. Take the notes on the mobile, import and organize in OneNote, and they were stuck there. No syncing back up with the mobile. I know you could use the tasks feature of Outlook for this (OneNote Task -> Outlook Task -> Mobile Task), but I was really stretching the boundaries with all the projects and tasks I was trying to keep organized all at once. This was the main reason I switched back to Palm and Bonsai.

Fastforward to the present. My boss has been raving about OneNote that comes with Office 2007. I just did a little googling and found that not only did Microsoft release a mobile client for OneNote 2003, but they have full mobile integration with OneNote 2007. Some other new features include OCR for any images you take and include with an outline (say with your mobile's camera), internal linking between outlines, and multi-user editing capabilities. It sounds like they've taken some good ideas from wikis.

Needless to say, I'm very interested. The only problem is that I don't have an up to date windows mobile platform (pocketpc or smartphone). This is probably a good thing since I really like my Natara Bonsai (and don't have the $$$ to get a new phone). It's just that I sometimes get stuck in Bonsai's rigid hierarchical nature (more on that soon).

If anyone out there is using OneNote 2007 (with or without it's mobile capabilities) I'd be very interested to hear from you.

Extra: It also looks like they've provided an API for OneNote 2007. This wasn't the case with OneNote 2003 (or maybe I didn't look hard enough).

Edit: The wikipedia article is pretty informative.

Months without a post and all I get is a stupid link?

Richard Rousseau — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:29:36 GMT

"Hello World" Programs

A compilation of how people in various areas and stages of their development careers might write the well known "Hello World" program. Very funny stuff. I love how "Enterprisy" the Master Programmer and Seasoned Professional are...

http://www.infiltec.com/j-h-wrld.htm (via Netorama)

Got Power?

Richard Rousseau — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 18:25:28 GMT

So when I arrived at work this morning I noticed that my computer had been restarted. After a quick brain scan I reassured myself that I had saved all my work from the last night. I logged in and checked my computer's even log. System came back up at 6:30, but no activity from about 11pm till then. I decide to check on the servers...

Domain Controllers (check, check)
Database (check)
Citrix (check)
Web Server...

Our web server wasn't responding. No biggie, I grab my keys and walk down to the server room to cycle it. As I approached the server room I noticed an unusually loud fan noise. I unlock the room and step into a sauna. By now I'm wondering what servers have been fried. I check the AC controls (our server room has it's own AC unit on the roof) and they read 99 degrees. I turn them off then back on. Nothing. Ok, time to call the boss. After getting the office park's phone number from the boss I give them a call. Apparently ComEd blew something and the entire office park (5 buildings) was in the dark from midnight to around 6:30. They are currently going building to building checking the breakers to make sure everything is back up. About 10 minutes after that conversation the head engineer stops by the office. I've met this guy before when all of the personal heaters we run in our office were causing circuits to trip. He told me that he'd have someone reset our AC unit on the roof and that should cool things off.

As of right now we still do not have AC in the server room. I borrowed a fan from another employee's office and I'm blowing cool air into the room. It's lowered the temp from about 99 to 94.

An interesting start to a Friday.

Edit - Apparently when I email a blog post it doesn't preserve the formatting.

The Mathematical Cartoons of Larry Gonick

Richard Rousseau — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 23:16:22 GMT

The Matematical Cartoons of Larry Gonick

Awesome comicbook style cartoons of mathematical concepts.

via Coding Horror

Google Search Tips...

Richard Rousseau — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 20:51:21 GMT

Google is a very useful and powerful resource. I google daily (yes, it’s a verb now). I can't imagine using a computer nowadays without google or the internet, though I am old enough to have used computers before the internet was mainstream. In fact, my first computer didn't have a hard drive, floppy or any other non-volatile backing store, but that’s another post.

The purpose of this post is to share some advanced googling features.I came across a post by CyberWire that points out some of the slightly more advanced Google search features. At the bare minimum, review the use of quotes and the "+" and "-" symbols. If you are still interested after that, I would also recommend the book“Google Hacking for Penetration Testers”.

If I had to choose one advanced Google feature that I think everyone should add to their repertoire, it would be the “site:” prefix. You can use this in your search to limit Google to only searching a particular domain. The neat part about this is that you can also use wildcards.

For example, if you wanted to search only government sites for information on renewing your passport, enter the following “renew passport site:*.gov”. This will limit your search to the .gov top level domain. Is Amazon’s website search not returning the results you expected? Try using “mybooktopic site:amazon.com”.

I have to admit that I also use the “define:” prefix quite a bit too. There is a firefox extension that allows you to highlight a word, right click and select “define” from a menu that will open a new tab with the definition. A very helpful tool if your vocabulary ain’t what it used to be. (I wrote an "extension" that allowed IE to do the same thing, if you're interested comment below and I will provide the code)